Contrary to popular belief, journalism is alive and well. The business model, well, that’s a different story. Part of it has to do with all the different ways we get our information. Part of it has to do with media sticking its collective head in the sand when it comes to adapting to the changing landscape.

That could start to change. One ambitious startup, Circa, wants to rethink the news model. It’s not yet launched, but Circa has attracted big-name backers, including Tumblr’s David Karp, Techstars’ David Cohen and David Tisch, and former Barbarian Group exec Rick Webb. The startup was cofounded by Cheezeburger CEO Ben Hunh, a journalism student turned savvy proprietor of shareable, fun Web content, and Matt Galligan, an entrepreneur who founded social aggregator Socialthing.

“I’d love to be pure digital, a printed newspaper is still by far the best way to consume news on the go,” said Webb. “The Internet hasn’t come close to cracking it yet. $149 a year is too much to read just the first two pages of The Economist. RSS is broken and my foray into aggregating a bajillion feeds to try and keep up didn’t work. But more than all of those, I think Ben and Matt have amazing insights into why all of this is broken, and what can be done about it.

I spoke with The AP’s social media editor, Eric Carvin, about the news organization’s social media strategies. 

In the spring of 1845, five New York daily newspapers made journalism history when they founded the New York Associated Press to help incur the costs to deliver news from Texas during the Mexican-American War. After some legal issues between it and the Western Associated Press, which led to the downfall of the NYAP, the Western Associated Press became the Associated Press in 1892 and over the next 150-plus years, has become one of the most important news services in the world.

Beyond delivering news to its 1,700 newspaper and 5,000 television and radio partners, the AP historically sat at the front of news technology innovation. Whether it was introducing the rotary press to speed up printing, bringing in teletypewriters (a printer connected to a telegraph) or launching the WirePhoto Network (ability to send images over phone lines), the AP offered new ways of information distribution. Now it’s confronted with the rise of social media.

Broadly speaking, the AP uses social media in two ways: gathering and disseminating information. The AP approaches each social network differently; what it does on Facebook is different that what it does on Twitter.

“Part of what we’re doing is sharing content in a curated way,” Eric Carvin, the AP’s social media editor said. “It helps as news gathering; if we’re looking to find someone who has amateur video, we put out a call and a good chance we’ll hear back from people.”

Should media brands engage/communicate/@ reply its followers on Twitter?

What do The New Yorker, People Magazine, Rolling Stone, Health Magazine and National Geographic have in common? Each magazine has eclipsed 1 million followers on Twitter. While numbers aren’t as important — anyone can buy followers — a look at how these publications reached and then maintained those high numbers reveals an interesting paradox: If social media is about engagement, why do these top magazine brands succeed in gaining followers when all they do is pump out its own content?

All outlets are not created equal, but social networks have proven to be somewhat of an equalizer for media brands. The iconic Time with its 3.4 million Twitter followers is put in the same category as celebrity rag People, which sits at 3.6 million followers. Interestingly, four of the five most followed magazines are Time Inc. publications: People, Time, InStyle and Entertainment Weekly. Women’s Wear Daily rounds out the top five.

What they have in common is that they use Twitter, for the most part, as a glorified RSS feed, pumping out stories from the outlet. There is little of the conversational aspect from their feeds. The closest they come to veering from the headline-and-links formula is using their accounts to promote writers.

The Weather Channel taps into people’s everyday lives; it’s a conversation starter. For the past three decades we’ve gotten our weather information from television, but the proliferation and ubiquity of mobile devices offer The Weather Channel’s consumer and advertisers more ways of talking about weather.

“There are new choices,” said Kenny. “With Weather.com and the mobile app, we find people consume it more. We add new things to give people more uses.”

We’re in the era of data everywhere. As the Web becomes more social (not there yet — see below), publishers have to look at even more touch points. We spoke with Sachin Kamdar, CEO of social analytics company Parse.ly, about some of the hurdles publishers keep tripping over.

What is biggest issue facing publishers when it comes to understanding social data?
The biggest issue is being able to aggregate other metrics with social data. What publishers do right now is think about social as its own silo. How many shares on Twitter, how many shares on Facebook? How does it intersect with the audience? They need to use pieces of data to come up with a social strategy moving forward. There’s a data problem now, as they aggregate across other data areas of their property. There needs to be one data stream. It’s about being able to surface those intersections for the publishers. Is my social audience different than the standard reader that visits? If so, how do I get them to stay and then share and comment and engage with them?

What are some mistakes that publishers make when looking social data?
The mistake is not going far enough; people treat social as a linear one-off thing — dropping a few social buttons on my site will be enough to get content viral. The other thing is that they just tweet out their own articles. Many publishers will treat social as an RSS feed and link to every post they have. This is not a way to engage with audience. Some digital companies don’t realize it’s not a one-way street. Content is your property; people are talking about it, so engage with them.

So it sounds like publishers need to look at themselves as brands?
I would take it a step further. Not only are publishers brands but so are the content creators themselves. They (reporters) should have all the data transparent to them to understand what audience is resonating with them from a social perspective and leverage that data to grow the audience.

But do publishers have resources to do this?
It takes technology to do it. When you think about this, they have to quickly pull in information from social networks into an interface for someone to understand how the data intersects. It would take someone sitting there and listening to what’s happening. There are free tools that can do an OK job; Google Analytics is a good way to start and may have to use that. But it’s more about letting content creators have their conversations about content and engage audiences in a multidirectional fashion, as opposed just posting on the site and waiting for comments.

Has the Internet fully moved from an SEO model to a social model?
Not yet. Search still very much accounts for a good portion of traffic. If you look at growth between the two, social is edging up where search was. Search is sort of flat; someone searches for something, you might now know their keyword. With social, you know the audience and brand and all the things that are interactive with social. It presents an opportunity to build an audience and engage with them. Publishers should leverage the fact that content is sharable; use it to your advantage as a publisher. When you think about social vs. search, SEO is almost commoditized to a certain extent in terms of practices, and in another sense, Google is always changing its algorithm, so it’s tough to optimize without spending a lot of money. The best bet is social where you have the ability to engage and optimize, and don’t need to spend money on an SEO tool or consultant. If you have important things to say, great content, you can use social to augment and push that so content reaches the potential you have instead of relying on search to drive traffic. It can be proactive instead of reactive.

Last year, when “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” was released in theaters, ApartmentTherapy.com noticed something weird in its social analytic dashboard: its audience was heavily talking about the film across the social Web. A light bulb went off: Let’s take an archived article from 2010 showing where people can buy furniture that was described in protagonist Lisbeth Salander’s room and repurpose it for those who seemed to be really, really interested (as based on the traffic coming from the social nets). The result: a huge spike in traffic, to the tune of up to almost 4,000 hits that day, 2,000 the following and then another little spike the following week, according to ApartmentTherapy’s CEO Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan.

Publishers have been looking at data for many years now. If you were a publisher 10 years ago, you probably spent a lot of time banging your head against your desk trying to figure out how to use SEO data to help drive traffic or even create easily searchable content. There’s clearly more data to comprehend today, much of it coming thanks to social media. Publishers are now regularly tapping into those pools of social data to inform, and even dictate, the content they create.

Editors at outlets from New York Magazine to Complex Media to GamesRadar.com pay attention to this data as it can push certain editorial decisions, giving insights into what an outlet’s readers are interested in.

“We write for an audience and care what people are responding to,” said Ben Williams, editorial director at New York Magazine, which uses Newsbeat. “That’s a factor in deciding what types of stories we do tomorrow, today or even next week.”

Social data helps publishers understand what content is performing well, and it also gives clues about how to improve content that doesn’t perform as well (based on drive traffic). Repackaging a story to get more traffic is nothing new. Something as simple as tweaking a headline to draw attention to the story has been happening for years. What is new, however, is the real-time analytics that give publishers a better understanding of up-to-the-minute discussions surrounding particular articles.

Click through to read the rest. I had a fun time working on this one.

It seems like publishers will pretty much turn anything — photos, hyperlinks, any empty space on a page — into an ad nowadays. It only stands to reason that Twitter backgrounds might be used as billboards.

Henry Blodget’s Business Insider has rented out its Twitter background to  Woodford Reserve, a high-end liquor brand. This is the third time BI has run such a campaign, which has always been add-ons to larger efforts on the site. It ran previous campaigns last year for Starbucks and Chivas.

It’s a novel approach that might help close a deal, but Twitter backgrounds are hardly going to be the next great ad vehicle. For one, not many people actually visit a publication’s Twitter page. There’s also no way to measure how many people see the message, which is a non-starter in digital media.

But according to Julie Hansen, president of BI, the effort is a way for a publisher like BI to offer a social component.  According to ComScore, Twitter drives .3 percent of traffic to Business Insider. The outlet says that its internal numbers say between 3 and 5 percent. For comparison, ComScore has Twitter driving .3 percent of traffic to Forbes and .2 percent to the New York Times.

Digital media has long favored the young. Newer entrants didn’t have the legacies of the dinosaurs they sought to replace. But in some ways, Facebook is giving power back to legacy publishing companies, at least with its shift to Timeline for company pages.

Last week Facebook rolled out its Timeline for brands, and media properties were quick to show off how deep into archives they could go. The Timeline is meant as a better way for Facebook residents to present themselves in unique ways. Media outlets are no exception. Whether it’s taking you all the way back to when the outlet was founded or highlighting coverage from historical events, media outlets can use Facebook as a way to draw readers into their worlds.

“They have to figure it out,” said Dave Marsey, group media director at Digitas. “It’s interesting because there’s a lot of news archives for the nostalgic out there.”

Click through to see how The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and one surprise candidate.

Hand-wringing over Internet comments is nothing new. YouTube’s comments have been notoriously toxic for years. Woe is the the hardy soul who puts on waders to delve into the thousands of incoherent rants on a typical Huffington Post politics story. The commenter troll is a venerable Internet archetype.

There have been two main ways to deal with this problem. The absolutists view Internet commenting as messy but essential. The registrars believe real identities will do away with the willingness to spill bile. Neither solution is perfect, of course, because both are blunt approaches.

Click through to read the rest.

In which I interview Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall.

Josh Marshall, editor and publisher of Talking Points Memo, sits in the back corner of the liberal-leaning political site’s L-shaped open office in Manhattan. He holds court for guests on a couch behind his desk, as he drapes his legs over his chair. The din of the 20 editorial staffers punctuates the conversation. The setting is a mix of newsroom and startup: reporters share tables, shelves of books litter the space, Macs are fired up and four televisions bask the office with the warming glow of cable news, a major industry award sits buried behind bottles of liquor.

While other early political bloggers, like the Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan, moved their writing to more mainstream publications, Marshall took a different path, sticking to his roots and building his one-man band blog into a real, honest-to-God media company. The question is whether his by-the-bootstraps approach will work in a rough ad market for news sites and with several well-heeled, aggressive competitors.

In which I look at car-comparison sites:

There’s a magical land in digital publishing where ads sell out, ad networks don’t exist, and advertisers clamor to close deals at high CPMs in an upfront process. Welcome to the digital world’s Shangri-La: car comparison sites.

These sites often strong-arm advertisers into paying higher rates because their audience has exhibited a clear buying signal — and for a high-ticket item. Manufacturers have to play hard ball with car comparison sites or risk losing a customer at the very point the buyer is ready to purchase.

According to industry sources, RPMs can be as high as $300 with eye-popping $100 CPMs in some cases. These fat-cat publishers have flipped the script on advertisers, pretty much setting a price and presenting it as a take-it-or-leave it proposition.

Social media helps publishers know their audience, which in turn, helps brands deliver the right ads. Publishers have an opportunity to thrive in the social space, with the help of its advertiser and media partners. Of course, the challenge they face is an old one: getting everyone seated at the table. Social media touches every aspect of company and has the ability to break down the silos. But in order for publishers to really get into social — and to innovate — they need to bring all of their communications partners to the table.